What I'm reading

I’m reading “The Diary of Mary Berg:  Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto.”  Mary Berg’s mother was born in America, which saved her and her immediate family from eventual annihilation by the Nazis.  In 1944 they arrived in the United States on the SS Gripsholm in exchange for a shipload of German prisoners.  With Mary Berg was a diary she had begun in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 when she was fifteen years old.  It was written in an abbreviated Polish that filled twelve notebooks.  It's a startlingly candid memoir of the Holocaust and the only one written by someone who survived the Warsaw Ghetto.  It was first published in 1945 and has since been reprinted with a new translation and forward.  

                The Holocaust.  That’s what it’s called.  Even now.  Even after Cambodia.  Even after Rwanda.  The Holocaust.  The template for genocide. 

                I was nine years old when I overheard my Aunt Ida say she was glad her parents weren’t alive. 

                “Why would Aunt Ida say that?” I asked my mother.

                “Because of Hitler,” my mother replied.  “If her parents hadn’t died in 1930, Hitler would be murdering them now.” 

                One day shortly after that I came home from school to find a man and a little boy talking to my mother in the living room.  I understood a little Yiddish, but not enough, and when I tried to talk to the little boy in English, he didn’t understand me. 

                “This is your uncle and cousin visiting Aunt Ida from Mexico,” my mother said to me.  “They’re the only ones in Aunt Ida’s family who escaped Hitler.”

                My mother peeled a banana for the little boy and he held it like it was an ear of corn and ate it end to end. 

                 My husband and I have a library of Holocaust and Holocaust-related books.  I read mostly about families who went through the Holocaust, my husband reads mostly its history.   My obsession with the Holocaust began with Aunt Ida’s remark; my husband’s began with his father Charlie's story.  Charlie's family came to the U.S. looking for the promised "streets paved with gold," and after a year of disappointments returned to Hungary, leaving seven-year-old Charlie in the care of a Jewish grocer and his wife.  Charlie converted to Judaism and married my husband's Jewish mother and the whole history would have remained a secret if my husband hadn't discovered a photograph of Charlie's brother in the uniform of the pro-Hitler Hungarian Army. What Charlie's story taught my husband and me was that as much as we try to erase the past, we can't.  We carry ourselves with us everywhere we go.  We leave letters and diaries and photographs.

                

Reading Fiction

I was once an avid reader of fiction.   I gobbled novels.  Ate them.  Lived and breathed them.  So as not to drown,in books, I became selective.  I  relied on critics  to tell me what was worth my time and money.  But sometime in the eighties something strange happened.  I'd buy one of the critically touted books and before I had finished the first chapter I'd feel my mind wandering.  I'd start flipping pages.  At about chapter three I'd put the book down and never pick it up again.  I lowered my reading standards.  I began to read novels that weren't literary enough for major review, but they didn't hold my interest; ingenious plotting couldn't atone for the lack of elegant prose.  Unread novels, like discarded boxes of cereal, began to pile up on all the tables in my house.  

If I had to point to one thing that killed my fiction-reading addiction, it might be the new American novel, a creature that was born and bred in the word swamp of  writing workshops, where the institutionalized writing of fiction has created a model that sucks out originality and depth and quirkiness.  Now, I love beautiful writing.  I love metaphors.  I love adjectives.  In my mind a well-crafted sentence is a thing of beauty.  But beauty that keeps looking in the mirror is a bore, and piled-on metaphors and untethered adjectives and endlessly repetitious writing is a cheat.  (Reviewers do their part in measuring the quality of a novel by listing and quoting its brilliant metaphors .)    

 Why can't we have elegant writing and narrative surprise and mind-blowingness in the same book?  Why can't we have fiction that doesn't tell us the same thing over and over and over merely to fill out the pages but instead knocks us over the head with delight?   

Wait.  What is that noise I'm hearing?  Is there dissension in the writing-program business? Did someone just say that they can always tell a book that has been workshopped?  Is there a new model on the horizon?